


A Spirit Hath not Flesh and Bones

by ifgnofc (coffing)



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game), Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:08:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22985344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffing/pseuds/ifgnofc
Summary: An ex-cop law student's father dies in mysterious circumstances. A trans-humanist thriller exploring cyberpunk themes a la Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077 franchises.
Kudos: 2





	1. Ripples on a Placid Lake

He pulls up his knees beneath his chin and looks out the small window. A faded TABESCO logo runs across the blanket. Orange glow on clouds over black buildings and the droop of wires over the street. A hundred meters below cars circulate like jellied blood in over-packed veins. There is the dull shriek of an air-taxi overhead that flashes a shadow across his wall as it passes in front of the sunset. The man gets up and urinates in the bathroom with the shower nozzle hanging over the toilet.  
He makes tea. Books lie unperturbed on his desk. There is a knock on the door, "Have a good meal.” He puts the plastic bag of food on the table and sits down on the floor. He unpacks the fish and the rice and the soup, and gets a metal spoon from the kitchen with some metal chopsticks. He sits at the table by himself and plays a show on the computer and watches it and eats and after dinner he opens a bottle of alcohol and drinks and lets the episodes play over him. He mixes the tea with the alcohol and continues to watch. When he looks out the window next the light from the sky is gone and a gentle glow comes from the windows in the buildings and the restaurants.  
The next night he is doing the same thing. The books in the same pile on his desk. He checks the news on his phone. His game controllers are in a box under the couch.  
The next night he is two bottles in and pouring the first drink from the third when his phone lights up. He slides in his earpiece and puts on a jacket and takes the elevator down to the street. Slogans scroll across buildings and wrap around the corners. He heads in the opposite direction the words are running. His father is waiting at the bar, drinking something green with a glass mixing spoon in it. "Did you get the video?"  
There were two men standing over a woman on a bloody spot on the ground in a room with no windows.  
His dad stirs the drink. "What did you think? Seem real?"  
"Video was. Not sure about the participants," he looks around, "be right back."  
He drinks the foamy beer and runs a hand through his hair.  
"We're running analytics on background noise. Video doesn't seem edited, engineers testing for fragmentation too. Seems like Dogpatch? Footage almost looks like the stuff you see from the new surveillance tech."  
"Mhm," another sip of beer.  
"Material aside, what do you think of the content? Scrap? Reoriented scrap?"  
"Probably simulated. Too excessive for thrill kill or snuff. I can look into it. Tomorrow."  
"I'll keep you in the loop. How's the prep going?"  
"Eh, studying when I can."

The law library is in the New Style, a long array of windows like binary zeroes drawing light into the stacks. He sits browsing the documents cloud-chained to the locale, old case studies and textbooks about the case studies. The details, individual names and complaints wash over him in a voiceless fuzz as he reads down the glowing white screen. Night fell early outside, days turning deeper into winter. A woman in a VR set is palming a trackball and looking from side to side, the cords running into the base of the set brushing against the collar of her shirt. The reference desk is unstaffed this late, just a security guard at the door with a black handgun in a holster on her hip.  
He runs up against a permission block and stands to stretch his legs. There is a spindly man at the node near the reference desk, and he waits to check out the required tab for the locked tort law case. His phone vibrates in his pocket. An unknown number, probably an advertisement, someone who purchased his contact information and wanted to sell him something. He ignores it, enters his student number in the kiosk and receives the USB tab from the dispenser.  
He's been working for another hour, and the library has been slowly emptying, the nodes of light which were other students in front of their keyboards blinking off and passing out the front doors. The anemic maintenance lights that keep the books lit casts a pall that seeps into the faces of those working here. Number withdrawn calls him again and he swipes the red icon left to close the call. It immediately rings again and he picks up.  
"Hello?" quietly, aware of being in the library.  
"Marco?"  
"Yeah. Who is this?"  
"My name is Penelope, I work with your father."  
"Can I ask what you're calling about?"  
"Your fathers had a heart attack."  
"What?"  
"I'm sorry. Can you come down to the station?"  
"What happened? How do you know?"  
"It's better to explain in person."  
"Of course."

He hugs his mother when he arrives. She looks out of place on the molded precinct chairs.  
"Massive infarction. A lot of alcohol in his system, probably what brought it on," the lieutenant had told him.  
“He was fine this morning,” his mother is speaking into his shoulder.  
“Would you like to see the body?”  
She nods slightly, and he follows her down to the morgue.  
“You can take him from here. It’s strange having one of our own down here.”  
“Sure.”  
He’s wearing his uniform. Eyes tinged with blue around the rims. Marco stoops and the attending officer leans over him.  
“Can we have a moment alone?”  
“Certainly.”  
He holds his mother’s hand, and when the officer has left he positions his body in between the camera and the body. He caresses his father’s still face, fighting down the feelings threatening to surge over him, until he feels the nodule buried in his father’s hair. He unlocks it and withdraws the minute cylinder, slipping into his palm. His mother puts a hand over her face and Marco comforts her.  
They remain for an hour, arranging transport to a funeral house and signing releases. He doesn’t ask for a second opinion, not from the precinct. They leave, and he shares a taxi with his mother back to his parent’s apartment, the cylinder coated with his father’s blood drying in his pocket.


	2. Wings

1.  
A field of stars free of atmosphere washes over the lens buried in the back of her eye.  
Cords fall from a port in the crown of her skull.  
The exhaust in the room is fully filtered by her aftermarket nostrils.  
Personal Optic Memory, housed on her employer's cloud database – the one who paid for the eyes.  
Hyejin on a beach, a drink, a man's head on her thighs.  
Mid-twenties, pressing himself to where she had changed.  
The humidifier on her bedstand puffs.  
A half-built twin Domestic climbs the sky opposite.  
A ragged metal growth cocooned in scaffolding, accreting daily.  
Construction workers finger fighting games in the loins of the structure.  
She turns a hardened, texturized dial over her temple to select memory events suggested by GLORIA.  
The replication of memory strengthens it; what you dwell on becomes who you are.  
Her personal memory library curated by teams deep in the hearts of conspicuously dull buildings.

2.  
From a bed of whores emerges a girl with a falcon on her fist,   
toddling from the bloody crush of Lower Bishkek.  
The discarded bags the poor repurpose worn on her feet,   
escaping with heavy metal pitted lungs to the steppe.  
Her sister paints and at night builds explosives.  
The girl visits a clinic and receives aerosolized robotics to repair her lungs.  
The humanitarian medical company growing like an abscess on the bodies of the sick.  
The elastic band pinches her hair as the attending pulls the mask tight to her face,  
a plastic hose pipes in a chill cloud of tiny robots.  
She is instructed to breath in, and out, inviting the designed bugs into her respiratory tract.  
The procedure is three days long, a flushing follows, then misting and second administration.  
Next week she is crawling through a bush that grabs at her skin,   
towards the red torn gut of a dead hare gripped in talons.

3.  
The gingko trees are bright yellow, flaring their will in the face of imminent shedding and shame.  
Hyejin passes under lateral canals.  
She removes her shoes, socks, shirt, pants, and panties.  
Zips the front, clamps the collar closed, and vacuums her body into the suit.  
The mechs are stuck like carapaces to the walls.  
The stacks shift and present the husk of her shell.  
She sockets herself into the cockpit, affixing wires, wrapped in government expense.  
The holoptic dome closes, her compound eyes open, circuitry and steel, a web of capital,   
the calcified profit of a weapons industry.  
She stretches out her arms and flexes her legs against the giving gel.  
A sun shaft pierces the launching barrel.  
Behind her the metal screech and shrieking of her wingmates.  
Lee’s dusky black mech bristles with false warheads.   
Command's dispassionate fatherly voice sounds through their heads.

4.  
Sprays of red like flowers on a canvas she refuses to digitize.  
Something to stretch in the dull incandescence of communal rooms.  
The satellite transmitter removed for the day, the bird can groom and sleep.  
She touches her sister's hair on the way to her room, asks, "How is your cough?"  
"Better, thank you," puncturing the foil cap of an artificial milk drink.  
She kisses her head, smell of hair pulled through refurbished lungs.  
She goes to her room and sleeps. Her sister paints, then eats, then cries, then sleeps.

5.  
Dropped at dawn, the mech feet muddy with developing steppe.  
Show of force escort plodding west. No threat so far despite intelligence.  
Just unlicensed drones without kill switches. A swarm of flies,   
following the tanker too heavy for roads, behind a tank probing the ground for bulbs of explosives.  
The girl from Bishkek’s bomb buried like a tulip.  
The sun falling, the solar catchers retract into the mechs, like bugs folding wings.  
The reactor of the land-tanker quiets to a thrum and the massive tracks slow.  
In the night the mechs are eggs on the ground.  
The sterile soldiers inside inert, tubes in their veins and wires in their eyes.  
She is a fully-encased de-gendered weapon, depressants are released by the mech into her blood.  
A phallus penetrates her rectum rhythmically, body braced against the dark inside of her dark egg.  
Resting on the path to growing towers sprouting from the steppe, a bulging mass of foreign investment.

6.  
The girl from Bishkek witnesses the disarmament of her bomb through a web feed.  
The fleshy snout of the tank sniffs it up, coats, and detonates it,  
sprays the area down and the feed dissolves into digital dust.

7.  
The tanker unloads construction material.  
Their route behind them a string of exploded ordinance   
like popped zits on the ground.  
Hyejin climbs out of the hatch and unwraps her head.  
Steel columns rise from deep holes drilled in the ground.  
A soaring falcon waits on a whistle  
to drop and meet the rising prey.  
Flushed by the girl over the crest of the hill  
whose lungs are being crushed by dust.


End file.
